Around the World in a Day: Experimental Cinema Now

with curator Michael Sicinski and Ja'Tovia Gary

A collection of films from the past year that use unconventional means to examine nature, history, and the many spaces we occupy. 80 minutes, five countries, one world.

Q&A with director Ja'Tovia Gary and Michael Sicinski to follow films.

Warning for Photosentive audiences: this program includes some flashing light.

Special Guests

Ja'Tovia Gary

Ja’Tovia Gary is an artist and filmmaker whose work seeks to liberate the distorted histories through which Black life is often viewed. In 2017 Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film. Her award-winning films have screened at festivals and cinemas worldwide.

Michael Sicinski

Michael Sicinski is a writer, critic, and teacher based in Houston.

Austrian Pavilion

Structuralist Philipp Fleischmann continues his architectural examinations of exhibition sites, using specially constructed cameras to capture the interior and exterior of his country’s national arts pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Country, Year

Austria,
2019

Director

Philipp Fleischmann

Runtime

2 MINS, 0 SECS

Genre

Experimental, Short

Subject

Experimental

Event Type

Compilation, Panel

Cityscape

Cityscape elaborates on the methods Snow used in the making of his ground-breaking 360-degree film La Région Centrale (1971). Taking the advice of his long-time friend, Graeme Ferguson, to produce it as an Imax film, Snow orchestrates new patterns of movement that exchanges the focus on landscape in La Région Centrale with the cityscape of Toronto.

Country, Year

Canada,
2019

Director

Michael Snow

Runtime

11 MINS, 0 SECS

Genre

Experimental, Short

Subject

Experimental

Event Type

Compilation, Panel

E-Ticket

A film sixteen thousand splices in the making. E-Ticket is a frantic (re)cataloguing of a personal archive and an opportunity for rebirth to forgotten images.

Country, Year

United Kingdom,
2019

Director

Simon Liu

Runtime

13 MINS, 0 SECS

Genre

Experimental, Short

Subject

Experimental

Event Type

Compilation, Panel

Lore

Images of friends and landscapes are cut, fragmented, and reassembled on an overhead projector as hands guide their shape and construction in this film stemming from Hollis Frampton’s Nostalgia.

Country, Year

United States,
2019

Director

Sky Hopinka

Runtime

10 MINS, 0 SECS

Genre

Experimental, Short

Subject

Experimental

Event Type

Compilation, Panel

Low Tide

The Toronto islands are subject to flooding and erosion. The ebbs and flows of Lake Ontario / Lake Iroquois have created the islands and will one day take them away. The shoreline is natural and artificial, built up with concrete sidewalk ruins but always just an ever-shifting sandbar.

Country, Year

Canada,
2019

Director

Eva Kolcze

Runtime

4 MINS, 0 SECS

Genre

Experimental, Short

Subject

Experimental

Event Type

Compilation, Panel

The Giverny Document

Filmed on location in Harlem, USA and in Claude Monet’s historic gardens in Giverny, France, The Giverny Document is a multi-textured cinematic poem that meditates on the safety and bodily autonomy of Black women. Gary unleashes an arsenal of techniques and materials including direct animation on archival 16mm film, woman on the street interviews, and montage editing techniques to explore the creative virtuosity of Black femme performance figures while interrogating the histories of those bodies as spaces of forced labor and commodified production.